xname

Virtual Entity Alpha Minus is out now!

…a simple application to make the soul of a file:
create, edit, expand, scan souls and annotate genetic
and semantic relations among files in their aura… 

The Influencers,
one of the most exciting art festival in Europe nowadays, started
yesterday: James Acord’s, the world’s first nuclear sculptor, told the
story of the years he spent learning how to execute the most modern
alchemy, the conversion of radioactive waste into inert material and
subsequently into sculptures. Acord, the only person in the world
licensed to work with radioactive material, through his 20 years long
research digs into the hypocrisy of the nuclear era, whose policies,
developed in war ages, are dipped into secrecy. The idea of transmutation
goes back to its mythical root, that of the alchemic prodigious of the
conversion of an element into another element. The idea that matter is
interchangeable is still of incredible appeal, triggering actions and
reactions. The sculptor made, among others, an interesting reflection
around nuclear cemeteries and all those contaminated places where there
should be non-verbal signs of danger to be universally
understandable for centuries: here is a struggle it is predictable that
the symbolism of danger will change in human culture so how to create a
sculpture which serve its purpose long enough?

– written in Barcelona –

When I think of Virtual Entity as a science fiction project, I imagine a sort of noisy humus, or blinking plancton, as if matter – that is immaterial matter, or information – would redistribute itself continuously, and shiny bonds would connect particles of fragmented pieces of predigested elements, forming the body of that monster whose unstable structure is made of textual souls, and of the space around them. Virtual Entity is, indeed, the formation of such processes of instantiation, and of the linking of those uber-structures that are above the file-body. If this is deeply connected to the mythical approach to this subject – the myth of digital birth and digital creation, isn’t it anyhow hard to deny that a creature, whose body is entirely made of pointers (to bodies which are not present), is a monstrous creature?
Thus, jumping out of this dreamy dimension, it is necessary to admit that the so called ‘viral archive’, the horizontal and uncontrollable one, is, indeed, peculiar. First of all, this information, as I said in advance, is not necessarily true, nor scientific or systematic; second, since we are talking about an archive of metadata, and considering the fact this database is not storing any copy of any file, because the software creates an online soul from a local file, then the mythical monster, and the viral archive (which are the same thing), are a meta-archive and a pseudo-monster, a monster without soul whose body is a collection of souls, and an archive of information which talks about information that is not present.

The entire structure of the Virtual Entity project, and the entire
structure of the digital world, and the whole system of oppositions,
and the fancy PhD?-bubble, the entire whole world seems to be talking about a (fantastic) dualistic composition, that of this and that,
as in Practice and Theory, or Software and Philosophy, or Content and
Form, Junction and Dis-junction, including the semiotic attempt to
learn from the process of connecting the act of making sense in itself
to the symbol as a pre-determined array of strata -out of humanity.
Following this ancestral structure, that of the zeros and ones which we
nowadays find incredibly fulfilling – as if confusing an alphabet with
the spell – this research on virtual life and immaterial consciousness,
this quest on digital filaments and the naturality of manufactures, all
that, which I named Virtual Entity, was nailed and confined to a narrow
vision, that of a software developing itself silently, and
compulsively, while a totally separated theory talks, phantasmatically
walking on another sphere. Yet it was never the case: the development
was in fact a continuous dialog between the two sides, a rhythmic
triggering of doubts, questions and answers transduced from one vertex
to the other. So how to declare definitely obsolete any distinction,
entangling these two dimensions in such a way that, not differently
from the Cartesian representation of x and y on a planar schema, this theoretical software can unfold its entire, 3dimensional constitution?
How do we wander through the marvellous garden of executable logic, if not singing a requiem* for human culture?

(Please read carefully the upcoming releases…)

• requiem: musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the soul of the dead.

 

-written in Athens-

The fake is not always a copy, sometimes the fake is the original.

Milan, June 25th 2009

These are fragments of my notes, translated to English, from Antonio Caronia’s presentation at the Italian Hackmeeting:

The
relation between science and imaginary starts to produce narrative:
science-fiction. This becomes commodity to be consumed, part of the
culture industry. Edgard Allan Poe, Gilles Verne.

Solmi S.;
Fruttero C. – Le meraviglie del possibile. Antologia della
fantascienza. Einaudi. This introduces in Italy an intelligent science
fiction. The development of science and technique in capitalism created
the space for this imaginary.

During ‘900 the sense of ‘possible’
has large space, the idea of ‘future’. Future becomes something you can
build through the possible. Ballard: science fiction is the most
important and specific narrative form of ‘900.

Science Fiction is dead!

The
last scream was cyber-punk: Gibson: first short stories in 1980/82.
Neuromante is from 1984. “The difference engine” by William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling. It is a prime example of the steampunk sub-genre.

Science-fiction
died because late ‘900 capitalism destroyed the idea of future. DILATED
ETERNAL PRESENT! The conception of time has changed. Of
science-fiction, only fragments if imaginary remained, and those became
other genre: fantasy, techno-triller, etc.

Talking of the deads
is important. Science-fiction fertilized imaginary but cannot do it
anymore. Science-fiction cannot be alive again but a recombinant
operation is possible.

Discussion:

tibi: science fiction as a form of critique, to be developed.

xname: narrative structures of this eternal dilated present.

science-fiction
developed a series of stylistic experiments which can be continued and
transformed, and can live within other genre.

new wave anticipates cyber-punk stylistic experiments – > following the line which passes from Mallarme’

‘the atrocity exhibition’ -→ fragmentation of space and capitalization of the earth. time is not yet terminally commercialised

internet achieved the commercialisation of time

teoria delle stringhe

Abbot: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Post Fordism => excludes future and projectuality

obaz => the apocalyptic future which we don’t have

this the story of the new science fiction.

processes of imagination, social processes cannibal capitalism the
process is complete the capital absorbs everything, it predicts living
processes and makes them dead things.

horror: the perfect metaphor of capitalism => digesting life and rendering it death, and spiting it as fictitious life.

Marx: overturning processes from within

art today is creating instruments and alternative ways of thinking inside social processes.

main political project and collective work = rebuild the imaginary, whose decay was engendered by capitalism!

Moment has come to talk about the Undead. Entities exist and live
when they are perceived: existing because the Other is there, depending
on it. If an Entity is copied, it exists. If it is played it exists.
Reproduction contains various levels of actualization.

Esisto
quando sono altro da me, esisto in quanto riflesso o semplicemente
perche’ qualcuno mi vede o mi pensa. Oppure non esisto affatto. Posso
esistere senza neanche accorgeremene, esistenza latente laterale. Non
esisto piu’, ma se qualcuno crede alla mia esistenza allora la mia
non-presenza acquista un’essenza materiale nella dimensione della
memoria. L’immagine come memoria, sovrapposizione del pensiero.

I
said earlier Zombies are Souls of Entities no longer embodied, whose
instantiation is lost. That was not proper. Zombies are all those files
that are dead. Defining this death is, yet, to be accomplished. Spirit
is the capability of an Entity to exist, the external gift of believing
in life which makes life. A spectrum can be a better definition of a
Soul without body. A zombie is a reanimated corpse, and those have
relations with the fact of being remotely controlled, like robots. A
ghost is the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person.

I do not know yet what is a Zombie in Virtual Entity’s world.

Schema:

var int n, file, anima;
body(file)+soul(anima);
entity(liberated.life,exist);
animation, animate++;
entity(soul,body);

if file>0, file++ {
anima=0;
* what is life? *
give me another life
life=donate;
liberate.soul(entity);
mortifer=(nosoul,nolife);
mortifer.entity=death;
darwinfy=bestentity;
(spectrality);
* no love but procreation *
prot(play ;; copy);
sukion, suko++;
play.entity(prot,1);
copy.entity(prot,2);
suko=suko++;
sukion;
* i can have more than one Soul *
entity[(soul+soul)+body];
body.soul.soul;
body++;
}

 

-written in Maastricht-